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Old April 28th, 2010 #1
Igor Alexander
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Default Abiotic (abiogenic) oil


Conventional Wisdom Regarding Oil Origins May Be Wrong, February 24, 2010 By Jay Lehr
This review is from: Black Gold Stranglehold (Hardcover)

In 1956, while studying petroleum engineering at Princeton University, I read a statement by Vladimir Porfir'yev, a prominent Russian geologist, who said, "The overwhelming preponderance of geological evidence compels the conclusion that crude oil and natural gas have no intrinsic connection with biological matter originating near the surface of the Earth. They are primordial materials which have been erupted from great depth."

My recognition of the near total vagueness of all I had studied regarding the origin of oil up to that moment made Porfir'yev's statement appear completely logical to me.

In the intervening years I read a great deal of material written by the late Thomas Gold of Cornell University, who espoused the very same scientific position on the origin of oil, which has been largely ignored by the U.S. oil industry. Not so by the Russians, who have uncovered vast reserves of oil as a result of not looking for biological decay and seismic structural traps, but rather just geologic structural traps connected to deep crustal hot spots.

Soviet scientists ridiculed the idea that an ancient, primeval morass of plant and animal remains was covered by sedimentary deposits over millions of years, and compressed for millions of more years of heat and pressure, to create oil and natural gas.


Longtime Soviet Knowledge

The story of why this theory did not advance beyond the Soviet Union is told in the excellent book Black Gold Stranglehold, along with much more about the myths of oil scarcity and the politics of oil.

The reason the theory never left Russia is that Stalin had no reason to inform his enemies, especially not Americans or the British. Also, most of the findings of the Soviet scientists were published in Russian, and few American or British scholars of the day read Russian. Besides, we were locked into the mindset that oil is a fossil fuel.

Over the past 50 years Soviet scientists have published hundreds of papers on the non-biologic formation of oil within the Earth. The theory is widely accepted in Russia, though largely unheard of in the rest of the world.

Americans have been deeply invested in the idea that we are running out of oil, and that oil companies are making unconscionable profits while destroying our environment and ignoring renewable energy sources. Any competing idea is so threatening that it has to be ridiculed and left unexamined, lest it be proven true.

How else could radical environmentalists continue their attack on the oil companies, a pillar, in their view, of American capitalism at its corrupt worst?


Challenging 'Dead Dinosaurs'

In 1982, Gold said in a publication with British scientist Fred Hoyle, "The suggestion that petroleum might have arisen from some transformation of squashed fish or biological detritus is surely the silliest notion to have been entertained by substantial numbers of persons over an extended period of time."

The fossil fuel theory dates back to the Russian scientist Mikhail Lomonosov in 1757, when he stated in the Proceedings of the Imperial Academy of Science in St. Petersburg, "Rock oil originates as tiny bodies of animals buried in the sediments which, under the influence of increased temperature and pressure acting during an unimaginable long period of time, transform into rock oil."

Dimitry Mendeleyev, who first arranged the Periodic Table of Elements based on atomic mass in 1896, fiercely rejected Lomonosov's theory. Nevertheless, Lomonosov's theory took hold throughout most of the world. Mendeleyev suggested oil is primordial material, but Russians themselves did not change their minds for more than half a century, and the rest of the world never did.

I was persuaded initially, many years ago, that oil was not derived from biologic material by the very same unanswered questions stated by Corsi and Smith: "Why don't the text books show the oil transformation formulas specifying in equation form the amount of pressure that must be applied over what period of time? Where do we find the exact chemical formulae under which ancient leaves and bones became hydrocarbon petroleum? Where is the laboratory experimental proof?"


Fossil Challenge Not New

Gold's most famous book on the subject was published in 1998, The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels. Gold's thinking about oil began with his primary discipline, astronomy.

As an astronomer, he was aware that hydrocarbons are abundant in the universe, where we assume no life exists. Thus, how could hydrocarbons be organic chemicals resulting from life processes on Earth? He reasoned that hydrogen--being common in the universe--could combine with carbon to form hydrocarbon whether life is present or not. This idea was evidently never passed on to geologists.

Gold reasoned that we find more oil in the Middle East than Florida or Montana because deep subsurface structures in the Middle East are more fractured there, allowing the oil to flow upward due to its low specific gravity and the rotation of the Earth. He believed the reason we find oil in sedimentary rocks is not because they encased rotting ancient forests and dinosaurs, but because sedimentary rock is porous enough for the oil moving toward the surface of the Earth to pool within it.

Corsi and Smith then describe how Gold deduced that oil, as it travels upward from deep within the Earth's mantle, is able to pick up various microbes and bacteria that live in the layers of rock through which the oil passes on its way to the Earth's surface. These microbes are adapted to living directly off the hydrocarbons that constitute the oil itself, without need of sunlight or photosynthesis.

Therefore, oil could contain evidence of living organisms and still be a completely abiotic substance (one not requiring any form of living agent to be produced). Corsi and Smith conclude that "the fossil fuel theory is limiting in that we are looking for oil in the wrong places, [and] underestimating the availability of oil because we are locked into a belief that oil will have to run out."


Peak Oil Deception

The authors lay much of the blame for this continuing confusion on the shoulders of M. King Hubbert (who happened to be one of my mentors), for telling the world in 1957 that oil production would peak in the 1970s and then decline. At the time, I questioned Hubbert to no avail, and regardless of the fact that he was known to be wrong by the time the 1980s came along, the energy doomsayers insisted that his core theory was right, but just a few decades off.

They still have not given up, despite the fact that new oil fields are being found worldwide. Today we have more proven oil reserves than ever before. There is no empirical evidence that these trends will ever stop.

The authors of Black Gold state emphatically that the world is not running out of oil. However, note the authors, this alternative hypothesis is "the one supporters of Hubbert's Peak never contemplate seriously." Hubbert's Peak proponents simply say that no matter how much oil we find around the world, eventually explorers are bound to find all of it.

Corsi and Smith nail current reality with the following observation: "Reading book after book predicting gloom and doom, we are left with the conclusion that the fossil-fuel advocates are locked into the type of thinking best characterized by Thomas Robert Malthus, whose famous 1789 essay predicted that population would ultimately outstrip our ability to produce food, resulting in a series of crises such as war and famine which in turn would cut back populations to more manageable levels."

Malthus is famous not because his theory was right but because experience proved him wrong.


Oil Reserves Growing

To support their claim that we have more accessible oil available than ever before, with a great deal more on the horizon, Corsi and Smith describe in great detail many of the newest oil fields being put into production, including ones in Kazakhstan, Iran, and countless offshore areas, all of which support their abiotic theory.

Taking data from the United States Energy Information Administration, the authors explain that in 2005 proven world reserves totaled 1.28 trillion barrels, while in 1980 the proven reserves were only 645 billion barrels.

Alarmists fail to realize that we are finding more oil all the time. Nor do they acknowledge that their predictions that we are running out of oil have always been wrong. They simply keep pushing the year we will run out of oil further decades ahead.

If Corsi, Smith, and Gold are right, that decade is unlikely ever to arrive.


Small ANWR Footprint

Corsi and Smith describe the foolishness of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) being put off-limits for resource recovery by the very same people who insist we are running out of oil. The area on which the president wishes to produce oil in ANWR, they say, compares to the size of a postage stamp on a football field.

The footprint of 2,000 acres we need against the more than 19 million acres in ANWR is only one one-hundredth of 1 percent. The object of the most vocal opponents of ANWR oil production is to stop all oil production in the United States instead of proceeding under environmentally responsible conditions.


Strongly Recommend

Black Gold Stranglehold also contains excellent chapters on the global warming hoax,described monthly on the pages of this publication, and our nuclear energy success and future potential.

Where else can you learn that we have 103 nuclear plants operating in 31 states providing the nation with 20 percent of its electric power, while Vermont, perhaps our most liberal state, gets 74 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, followed by South Carolina (55 percent), Connecticut (54 percent), New Jersey (52 percent), Illinois (50 percent), and New Hampshire (43 percent)?

I strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the world's oil supply from the point of view of economics, politics, exploration, location, and technology.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jay Lehr, Ph.D. ([email protected]) is science director of The Heartland Institute.
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Old April 28th, 2010 #2
Igor Alexander
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Default Huge Petroleum Find In Gulf of Mexico

Huge Petroleum Find In Gulf of Mexico
by Jerry Corsi
http://oilismastery.blogspot.com/201...of-mexico.html

Last week, Royal Dutch Shell PLC announced the discovery of 100 million barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico at a depth more than 25,000 feet below the seabed, in 7,217 feet of water, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

The report once again confirms the argument my co-author Craig Smith and I made in writing "Black Gold Stranglehold: The Politics of Oil and the Myth of Scarcity," namely that oil is generated by abiotic processes on an ongoing basis deep within the mantle of the earth.

In other words, oil is not (and never has been) a "fossil fuel," produced by biological material, including dead dinosaurs, ancient forests, or today's favorite championed by the remaining advocates supporting the biological theory of the origin of oil – plankton.

Six months earlier, BP announced a "giant" discovery of oil in its Tiber prospect in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Wall Street Journal further reported that in 2008 alone, 15 discoveries of large oil reserves were found in the Gulf of Mexico, largely due to advances in deep-water drilling technology.
Brazil discovers giant offshore oil fields in Atlantic
One of the continuing fallacies of peak oil theory is that there is a reliable way to know how much undiscovered oil remains yet in the earth.

Peak-oil theorists are typically fossil-fuel advocates who believe that since there were only a limited number of fossils, the oil produced from those fossils must also be limited.

Abiotic oil theory postulates that oil is formed on a constant basis deep within the mantle of the earth, requiring no deterioration of biological material to produce the oil.

In November 2007, Brazil announced the discovery of a huge offshore oil field that could contain as much as 8 billion barrels of oil, enough to expand Brazil's 14.4 billion barrels of proven oil reserves by 40–50 percent.

The "ultra-deep" Tupi field was found under 7,060 feet of water (1.34 miles down), under 10,000 feet of sand and rocks (another 1.89 miles down), and another 6,600 feet of salt (1.25 miles), for a total of 4.48 miles below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.

Sergio Gabrielli, the chief executive officer of the state-run oil firm Petroleo Brasileiro SA (PBR), told Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva that reserves in the pre-salt area off Brazil's coast are much larger even than the Tupi field, possibly containing as much as 80 billion barrels in oil reserves.

By specializing in advanced ultra-deep offshore oil exploration, Brazil has moved from being a country dependent on ethanol for its gasoline consumption to becoming a net exporter of oil within less than a decade.

That Brazil has effectively become the Saudi Arabia of the Western Hemisphere should be enough to cast doubt on the peak-oil theory.

With three-quarters of the world's surface under water, how many more Tupi fields are there yet to be discovered?

The abiotic-oil theory predicts deep-water finds of oil will dramatically increase estimates of world oil reserves in coming decades.
Why the world will never run out of oil
Economist Julian Simon, then a professor of business administration at the University of Maryland and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, was famous for taking a contrarian position on energy resources, arguing that our perception of scarcity was not validated by the current or historical factual record of energy abundance.

Simon argued that gloomy predictions about running out of oil, coal or any other energy resource, including natural gas, were typically wrong for several reasons, including these:
  • Typically, all energy resources exist on earth in quantities much larger than initially estimated;
  • Advances in technology make exploration and recovery of previously difficult-to-develop energy resources more efficient and economically affordable;
  • Improvements in productivity lead to more efficient use of energy resources over time;
  • Alternative sources of energy are found, even while predominately used energy resources remain abundant;
  • Previously dominant energy resources, such as coal, become less dominant as more efficient energy resources, such as oil, become more understood and utilized – a process Simon believed would continue as liquefied natural gas replaces oil applications, culminating in nuclear energy replacing many current applications of oil and natural gas.

Simon's energy-resource analysis essentially maintains that we will be running automobiles with nuclear batteries long before we run out of oil.

Yet peak-oil theorists insist we have only another 10 years left before the world's oil supply begins to dwindle.

Red Alert believes that scientists in the next 10 years will accept that peak oil, like global warming, was predicated on "junk science."

Still, that does not mean peak-oil theorists or global-warming alarmists will abandon their ideological views.
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